Videos: Balam Acab, “Motion,” “Apart” and “Welcome”

Last week researchers at Berkeley demonstrated a new way to not only read people's thoughts, but reconstruct them in video. Here's the experiment: you lie down in an MRI scanner and watch something, and they analyze the flow of blood through your visual cortex, and that data's fed through a computer with an already-blood-motion-analyzed 5,000-hour bank of YouTube clips. The computer recreates your thoughts by finding video clips that look like what you're thinking and blending them together. It's crazy. It looks like this. These Maiya-directed Balam Acab videos look like thinking too. The latest, "Motion," is above, and "Apart" and "Welcome" are below, the first three in a series that will eventually encompass the whole Wander/Wonder LP. Maiya's videos are like the romantic version of brain waves: a kaleidoscoping bed of clouds, woman's face fading in and out on top, rain and spray from riding a water slide. Looking forward to more, hoping beyond all hope they shape shift their way into a Balam Acab live show, ideally performed in the Rainforest Café.

Update: These are not the official W/W videos, which have yet to be unveiled and will presumably shatter any visual-linear conception we naively cling to of what human thoughts actually like. Stay tuned.